System and method for payment card industry enterprise account number elimination

Abstract

A system and method replaces credit card numbers in systems that are customer facing with token Ids to thereby reduce exposure to credit card number theft.

What is claimed is: 
     
       1. A system for providing payment card industry enterprise account number elimination, comprising:
 a vault infrastructure in communication with client facing applications, the vault infrastructure having programming for receiving a credit card number; and 
 a credit card authorization system in communication with the client facing applications; 
 wherein the vault infrastructure is operable to:
 substitute in real-time a token id for the credit card number upon receipt of the credit card number from a customer and prior to communication with the credit card authorization system; and 
 cause the token id to be used by the applications in lieu of the credit card number. 
 
 
     
     
       2. The system as recited in  claim 1 , wherein the token id has a number of digits equal to a number of digits provided to the credit card. 
     
     
       3. The system as recited in  claim 2 , wherein the token id has a bin that is different than a bin of the credit card. 
     
     
       4. The system as recited in  claim 1 , comprising a mini-vault in communication with the vault, the mini-vault being adapted to locally cache token ids and credit card numbers to help distribute calls to the vault over the course of a day. 
     
     
       5. The system as recited in  claim 4 , wherein the mini-vault resides on a customer facing system server. 
     
     
       6. The system as recited in  claim 4 , wherein the mini-vault communicates with the vault via batch transfers. 
     
     
       7. The system as recited in  claim 4 , wherein the cached token ids and the credit card numbers are incapable of being correlated to one another outside of the system. 
     
     
       8. The system as recited in  claim 4 , wherein the cached credit card numbers are encrypted.